Essays

2009-01-01

The theory of evolution: 150 years afterwards - a Distinguished Lecture in celebration of the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species as published in Contributions to Science, 5 (1): 11-16 (2009) [Institut d'Estudis Catalans, Barcelona, DOI: 10.2436/20.7010.01.55]. PDF version, with Spanish translation.

2003-03-00

Wholeness - Preface to Keeping Things Whole - Readings in Environmental Science: 21 selections from key thinkers in the natural sciences, social sciences, literature and philosophy. Published by The Great Books Foundation, Chicago, USA, March 2003. "In spite of recent increases in understanding, environmental science is still in its infancy, not least because so many of the interconnections between biological and physical processes have yet to be put together. Interdisciplinarity is never easy, but never more necessary. This book is a real contribution towards it ... "

2002-08-02

Communicating Climate Change - Published in Science Volume 297, Number 5582, Issue of 2 Aug 2002. " I remember the editor of a leading British broadsheet dismissing climate change as yesterday's story. News has to have a beginning and an end, and often has to be artificially polarized. A process that occurs over years or centuries is hard to report on very often. Moreover, the story carries uncomfortable implications... "

2002-00-00

Scientists and Gaia - "The Gaia hypothesis is a human observation about the relationship between life and its physical environment work on the surface of the Earth. It at once a very old idea and a very new one. What was first a kind of analogy has now become an integrative factor in modern science." For the Financial Times.

2000-00-00

Visions of the 21st Century - a view to the future at the turn of the Millennium. "In so far as we can peer a hundred years ahead, we can wish our successors well, and hope that they will enjoy more of an equilibrium than is possible in our own unsustainable and crowded but creative society... I suspect that they will look back on us as a messy, short-sighted, wasteful, crude, and aggressive lot. Let us hope they are not the same."